56 Days
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“I’m just going to forget you said that last bit.”
“I’d appreciate it.” Karl nods solemnly. “Not my best work.”
“Laura as Ciara. Ciara as Laura . . .” Lee leans back in her chair and resumes her absentminded swiveling. “It’s not the worst theory you’ve ever had, but that’s not saying much now, is it?”
“Think about it: none of the other residents reported seeing this Ciara woman.”
“They didn’t remember seeing Oliver either. Not since lockdown began.”
“There were no pictures of her on his phone.”
“There were no pictures of anybody on his phone.”
“And all the text messages conveniently contain no identifying information that might lead us to Miss Mysterious. I rest my case.” He winks. “The end.”
“We’ll have to get the cell-tower data for the Ciara phone. Track its location. Maybe that would lead us to CCTV or something. A traffic cam. Something on a city street. We might find her that way.”
“Or we might waste hours of manpower investigating a noncrime to get a grainy picture of Laura Mannix.”
“So what do you suggest we do, Karl?”
“I think if we’re going to do anything, it’s get Laura on obstruction of justice. She should’ve called us two weeks ago and she’s been fibbing to us today. She still is fibbing, if my theory is correct. Which, of course, I think it is.”
“Of course,” Lee says, rolling her eyes.
“I think there’s a far greater chance of that than there is of anything else going on here. I mean, consider the alternative. Someone force-fed this dude one of his own roofies and pushed him through the shower door, and left absolutely no definitive proof of their existence save for a phone that no doubt will be registered to some made-up name and useless address. Wiped the apartment clean. Managed to be going in and out of it for however long they were together without being seen except by one woman who can’t be trusted. Knew to leave before the seven-day CCTV loop kicked in. And made the whole thing look like it was just a tragic accident. We both know that master criminals are nowhere near as common as Netflix would have us believe.”
“Hmm,” is all Lee says to this. She looks at the clock on the wall. “Better make a move.” She gets up with a groan.
Karl gets up too, stretches. “So what are we saying here?”
“Let’s go with accidental death pending toxicology and further inquiries. Low chance of blowback. We’ll tell the Super we’re going to try to find this mysterious Ciara woman and bring Laura Mannix in for a more formal chat.” She sighs. “And here was I, thinking I’d have a nice quiet, relaxing weekend . . . I was even going to get my shit together, you know?”
“Do you ever think,” Karl says, “that maybe you have your shit together, it’s just that your shit doesn’t look like everybody else’s?”
“Did you just come up with that?”
“I’m not just a pretty face, you know,” he says with a wink.
“Right now, you’re not even that.”
“It’s hard to hear you through the glass house you’re standing in.”
“Oh—and after we do this, you’re going to give Eddie Moynihan his cuffs back.”
“What?” Karl makes a face. “Why?”
“Because it’s the right thing to do.”
They start making their way around the desks, heading in the direction of the Superintendent’s office.
“Where am I going to say I got them?”
“I don’t know,” Lee says. “But whatever you do, don’t tell him where they’ve been.”
3 Days From Now
On Tuesday the two-kilometer restriction becomes five, and Ciara is up with the dawn. She knocks back a coffee—she’s kept that habit, even investing in a knock-off Nespresso machine she saw on sale in Aldi—before sticking her feet into her sneakers and heading outside. The sun is weak and chilly, but pushing its way up into a cloudless sky. She walks along the canal, then cuts down Haddington Road past St. John’s College, turning right onto Bath Avenue. When the expanse of Sandymount Strand comes into view—and, beyond it, the gentle steel-blue waves of the Irish Sea stretching all the way to the horizon—she feels a physical release, a lead weight disappearing from her shoulders, a lightness shooting through her heart. And then the assault of the sea breeze, whipping her hair in every direction and sandblasting the skin on her face.
She likes it.
It’s waking her up, bringing her back.
For more than two weeks now, she’s been mostly hiding out in the studio apartment, scurrying out after dark to buy groceries and newspapers, scouring them and the internet for news on Oliver St Ledger. It finally came on Friday online, Saturday morning in print: Gardaí in Dublin are investigating the death of a 29-year-old man whose body was found at an apartment block in Harold’s Cross, Dublin 6, early this morning. The grim discovery was made following reports by neighbors of an odor emanating from the man’s apartment . . . foul play is not suspected.
She had thought she would’ve spent those two weeks with Oliver. She was going to tell him the truth, all of it: who she was, why she’d felt compelled to find him, and that she had, in little ways, started to love him.
That she wanted to stay with him, to see if that love could grow.
But his admission had changed everything. Now she grieves for two people: the Oliver who never was, and the Shane who never got to be.
The pain in her heart is acute, mixed, and confusing. She catches herself thinking of Oliver, of being with him, of believing in him, and finds herself wishing things had turned out a different way. But then she remembers what he said, that he had been the ringleader, that what had happened all those years ago had happened because of him, and with a cold, steely certainty she knows things couldn’t have gone another way.
She’s not worried they’ll come for her. She had set out to build a lie that would protect her, a kind of shark cage that would keep a distance between her real self and Oliver, and she’d inadvertently created a phantom. She’d realized this standing feet from his unconscious body, watching a puddle of water build in the bottom of the shower, knowing what could happen when a person’s nose and mouth were resting against the tiles.
Knowing she could just walk away.
She had borrowed the job and last name of a real Cirrus employee she’d found on LinkedIn and made her own profile in the hope that if he looked, he’d find the fake one first and go no further. She had only ever communicated with Oliver via a pay-as-you-go-phone, which she’d registered to Oliver’s name and the KB Studios address, and before she’d left his apartment for the last time, she’d used it to send a text message that suggested her and Oliver had broken up. She’d watched the text message light up Oliver’s phone’s screen and found another layer of protection: that day by the canal he’d asked her for her last name, but he’d never actually entered it. She was just “Ciara” in his contacts. Her real phone had never left the studio apartment back at Sussex Court.
She’d stayed in his apartment that night, while Oliver’s body grew pale and cooled, scrubbing every trace of herself away. The only person other than Oliver who ever even knew she was there is the journalist, Laura, and what information does she have, really? Not much more than the Gardaí. Laura knows what Ciara looks like, yes, but Ciara is already making an effort to change that.
And why would anyone be looking for her? Oliver fell and died. He had a tragic accident.
He had got himself into that shower, in that position, and was slipping into unconscious. She had turned off the water when she’d first entered the bathroom, when his head was in the sink. All she’d done is reset the scene. Put the shower back on, like it was when she’d found him. Back to first positions.
There was no responsibility to shoulder.
As far as she was concerned, Oliver had done
it to himself—and apparently, the Gardaí agreed.
Foul play is not suspected.
In the dark, though, late at night, when she’s on the cusp of sleep and doesn’t have the energy to tell herself any more stories, she has to accept that she has done the very thing she’s spent her life terrified that her brother had, that in the pursuit of that truth, she’s found another one: there is a killer in her family.
But it’s her.
The only solace she’s been able to find is that she understands now there might be a difference between killing and being a killer.
She hopes, for her sake, that there is.
Even though it’s early, the beach is dotted with dozens of people, but with the tide halfway out there’s more than enough room for everyone. Ciara can walk along the water’s edge without even coming close to any other early morning beachgoers.
She watches the ripples of the waves for a while, the sun splintering into shards on the surface, shifting and disappearing, breaking over it again.
Then she feels, rather than hears, her phone ring in her pocket.
Siobhán.
As far as her sister is concerned, Ciara came to Dublin for a job interview at a phantom hotel, owned by the chain she already works for, for a position on their opening team, the staff who ready everything in the months leading up to the day they open their doors and welcome their first arrivals. When things with Oliver began to look promising, Ciara had called her sister and told her she was taking the job but that it was temporary, just for a few weeks. Her real job, in the meantime, had been decimated by the coronavirus restrictions; there were no events going on at all during lockdown, and eventually most hotels closed. Her boss in Cork had instructed Ciara to apply for the Pandemic Unemployment Payment, which she did, and she passed her “workdays” in Oliver’s apartment reading and playing Solitaire. Eventually she’d made her continued stay in Dublin more plausible by telling Siobhán that, under the circumstances, the hotel had offered her a room to stay in for the duration, free of charge.
Now the government has announced the reopening plan, she can’t expect to actually return to work until July at the earliest. She can’t afford to stay in Dublin that long and keep paying rent in Cork, so she’s going to chance taking the train home at some stage this week. She’s not worried about meeting a Garda checkpoint along the way; it turns out, she’s pretty damn good at lying.
She’ll tell Siobhán now that she’ll be home soon, she thinks, as she answers the call. First order of business when she gets there is to visit her mother. She’s not sure what the likelihood of that is at the moment, but surely when a patient is in hospice care, allowances can be made.
She needs to tell her what she’s found out, about Shane.
“Hello?”
Siobhán said there was nothing Ciara could do to bring him back, but she was wrong. She’s brought Shane back to himself, to who he was before, in their memories. She’s been able to correct them, to clean them, to make them accurate and true.
“Ciara?” Her sister’s voice is faint, barely audible above the whipping wind. “Can you hear me? Are you there?”
“I can barely hear y—”
“Ciara, it’s Mam. She’s about to go.”
Running.
Ciara is doing it before she even forms the intention to, holding the phone to her ear, shouting, “Hang on, hang on, hang on . . .”
She’s saying it to her sister, but willing her mother to, too.
As she runs back up the beach, up to the steps to the path and around the corner of some cement structure that she hopes, if she stands in its shadow, might block the wind.
“Siobhán?”
“You sound much better now.”
“Is she lucid?”
“I think she can hear me. She can’t talk, but . . .”
“Is it just you there? Are you alone with her?”
“Yeah?”
“Put me on speaker.”
There’s a rustling noise and then, when Siobhán speaks again, it has the amplified, echoey quality that assures Ciara that her mother is now listening too.
She takes a deep breath.
She bites back her tears.
“Mam,” she says, “it’s me. Ciara. There’s something I need to tell you. It’s . . . It’s about Shane.”
Author's Note
The first case of COVID-19 was reported in Ireland on February 29th, 2020: a male who had traveled to an affected area of Italy returned here with the virus. On March 9th, all upcoming St. Patrick’s Day events were canceled and on March 12th, it was announced that schools, childcare facilities, and cultural institutions would close. These were joined by bars and restaurants three days later.
The first “lockdown” was announced on March 27th. At the time, we didn’t know it would only be the first or that it would stretch well into the summer. Initially, we were told it would last for two weeks. All nonessential journeys were banned. All nonessential workers had to remain at home. There was to be no mixing with people who didn’t live with you and vulnerable people had to “cocoon” in their homes. In essence, the message was: stay at home except to purchase food or to take brief, individual exercise within a 2 km radius of your residence. On April 8th, with Easter weekend looming, An Garda Síochána launched Operation Fanacht (Stay) to ensure compliance with a new law under the Health Act 1947: Section 31A—Temporary Restrictions (COVID-19) Regulations 2020. Breaches could incur a fine of up to 2,500 euro or even a jail sentence. Two days later, on April 10th, lockdown was extended for a further three weeks.
I spent this time alone in a tiny studio apartment in Dublin city center that had a bed that came down from the wall. (Yes, just like Ciara’s. My apartment was much, much nicer though!) I rewatched Lost and built LEGO and baked banana bread and had Zoom cocktails and posted Instagram stories and got the idea for this book. (You can still watch those Instagram stories in a “Lockdown” highlight on my account, @cathryanhoward.) I didn’t have to worry about home-schooling or losing my job or vulnerable relatives, and I was grateful for that every single day. Also, as a card-carrying introvert, there was a part of me that liked having to cancel everything and stay at home. But still, as time went on, I started to go more than a little stir-crazy.
On May 1st, our government announced a phased plan for reopening the country that would see schools remain closed until September and restrictions gradually lifting, beginning on May 18th. For now, the “lockdown” would remain in place, except for one concession: from May 5th, the 2 km-radius exercise limit would increase to 5 km. I had steadfastly followed the rules from day one and so had not been to the beach (4 km from my door) since restrictions began. Come Tuesday morning, I set an early alarm and was at the water’s edge on a very cold and windy Sandymount Strand by eight a.m.—yes, just like Ciara.
In the early days of this pandemic, many writers took to social media and elsewhere to vow that they would never write about this in their books, that once this was over no one, including them, would ever want to think about it again. But back then, we had no idea that this event would change the world. And while I was locked down in Dublin, I had an idea for a story about a couple locked down in Dublin, for whom the strange, isolating circumstances of this new and uncertain world was just the opportunity they were waiting for—and I wanted to write it, so I did.
Across what turned out to be three lockdowns, these characters kept me company. My hope is that in a brighter, more hopeful world, their story has entertained you.
Dublin, Ireland
January 2021
Acknowledgments
Thank you to my agent, Jane Gregory; my editors Sarah Hodgson and Stephanie Glencross; Penelope Killick, for sending life-changing emails; Casey King, Garda consultant extraordinaire; Andrea Carter, for answering random legal questions early on a Saturday morning; and everyone at David Higha
m, Blackstone Publishing, Corvus/Atlantic Books, and Gill Hess. Thanks to Hazel Gaynor and Carmel Harrington for Nespresso-requiring WhatsApp audios, Quarantini boxes, and Zoom chats (I probably could do this without you, but I wouldn’t want to), and, as ever, thanks to Mum, Dad, John, and Claire. Iain Harris, I hope you enjoy your dedication as much as you do flight-tracker apps, casual blazers, and people messaging you to tell you they’ve seen your name in my books.
And finally: thank you to you, the reader. I thank you most of all.
About the Author
Catherine Ryan Howard was born in Cork, Ireland. Her debut thriller, Distress Signals, was an Irish Times and USA Today bestseller and was short-listed for the Crime Writers’ Association John Creasey New Blood Dagger and the Irish Crime Novel of the Year. Her second novel, The Liar’s Girl, was a finalist for the 2019 Edgar Award for Best Novel. Her most recent novel, The Nothing Man, was a #1 bestseller in her native Ireland. She lives in Dublin.
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